Brief History

The 12.8 cm PaK (Panzerabwehrkanone) 44 was the largest caliber German anti-tank gun fielded by her armies during World War II. It was designed as a final response to the escalating armor/anti-armor spiral which continued right through the end of the war, and afterward. Experiences with Russian 122-mm guns and the heavy armor of the KV and IS tanks had shown that even the vaunted 88-mm gun had its limitations.

The choice of 128-mm was made due to existing tooling being available for this caliber as naval and anti- aircraft weapons.

Contracts for design and prototypes were awarded to both Krupp and Rheinmetall-Borsig, with testing commencing in late 1944. The Krupp design was chosen for series production, and although performance was impressive, a towed weapon weighing nearly 11-tons was simply not practical. Various carriages, both foreign and domestic were tried, with varying degrees of success.

Introduction

This newest release from Moebius Models the 1/12^th scale Creature from the Black Lagoon is a continuation of their popular Universal Studios “Monsters of the Movies” series of famous movie monsters. This kit is smaller than the previous releases of Frankenstein and the Mummy, which were 1/8^th scale. This kit is also a Snap-Together kit with only 14 parts. The entire kit only took 15 minutes to clean up and “Snap-Together” the parts. In the past I have never been fond of Snap-Together kits. Usually they are designed for the younger modeler and ease of construction is the underlying factor in these kits.

The fit on this model had me working very hard from every direction. For example, on the tailplane, there was a locator tab that didn’t seem to have a matching hole. The result was that I accidentally mounted the horizontal stabilizer inverted. I had to carefully prize it off and clean the parts before remounting it and adding the vertical stabilizer and tail struts.

I applied most of the paint scheme before final assembly. A second-line R.A.F. type, (post-1941) called for a medium gray/olive green upper surfaces (Testors 1163 Flat Gray for the gray and my suicide stew bottle of mostly Pactra olive greens for the green) and “Sky” undersides (a mix of Testors 1162 Flat Blue and Model Master FS36375 Light Ghost Gray).